What rating to give an important, but awful piece of media?

[Rynjin]

Do you find it to be effective art? Was it constructed with craft and skill?

That determines its quality. You don't need to have 'enjoyed' the work. Whether it's historically important is irrelevant.

Ultimately, you're trying to convey more information than a star rating system is capable of.

I hold the opposite opinion. If you make a piece of art with "craft and skill" but it's not enjoyable or engaging, too bad. You suck, try again next time.

I don't really care if you can photorealistically recreate what a bowl of fruit looks like, a bowl of fruit isn't an interesting art subject. Similarly, I'm not really interested in how cool and avant garde your camera angles and lighting are if the content you're sprucing up is inherently uninteresting.

Too many artsy indie films fall into this trap; so concerned with showing off how "skilled" they are as filmmakers that they forget to do, say, or show anything interesting.

[Kornaki]

At least when you're talking about places like Amazon, and given the propensity for data to be passed around like a bong at a music festival, basically any website, the question you are actually answering is " should this product be recommended for purchasing more than other similar products"

If some random person decides to purchase the thing after reading the description, are they going to be satisfied? And should people who weren't actively seeking buying this thing consider buying it anyway? If the answer to both is yes, give it 5 stars.

I suspect for many of the works you're thinking about, random people are not actually interested in buying it but for the fact they haven't been reminded that it exists, so your 5 star rating isn't helping.

[Psyren]

Ultimately, you're trying to convey more information than a star rating system is capable of.

I agree with this, though "artistic merit" and even "technical skill" are not the only things such works are capable of highlighting that can be lost in a star rating.

I don't really care if you can photorealistically recreate what a bowl of fruit looks like, a bowl of fruit isn't an interesting art subject.

You might want to give Caravaggio, Cezanne, and Picasso a call then

(But these also prove the point - rating their fruit bowls with stars, even putting aside moral/ethical/etc concerns and focusing purely on technique or aesthetics etc, just isn't particularly useful because one rating scale can't capture those things either.)

[halfeye]

At least when you're talking about places like Amazon, and given the propensity for data to be passed around like a bong at a music festival, basically any website, the question you are actually answering is " should this product be recommended for purchasing more than other similar products"

What if similar products are by definition also unethical? People have canned excrement before now and sold it as art, would you want to compare cans between productions, or say any canned excrement is bad art?

If some random person decides to purchase the thing after reading the description, are they going to be satisfied? And should people who weren't actively seeking buying this thing consider buying it anyway? If the answer to both is yes, give it 5 stars.

I suspect for many of the works you're thinking about, random people are not actually interested in buying it but for the fact they haven't been reminded that it exists, so your 5 star rating isn't helping.

What if the item is mind affecting? what if it can make some small minority of the people who interact with it mentally unwell? That is the sort of thing that should be given zero stars however well or badly it is done.

[Aedilred]

Building on the truemane's point, I think those works I would rate 1 or 5 stars says more about me than it does about the media in question. There are many technically proficient and even good movies that get 4 stars, but because it doesn't say anything I consider all that meaningful or interesting (or I consider it to really not have any implicit purpose/meaning at all) it doesn't get that extra bump to 5 stars. Similar situation for the 1-star/2-star divide.

It's probably a pretty good metric to get to know me as a person, if I were to list movies I'd 1 or 5 star:
1-star Taken
5-star Good Time
I could make the listings more exhaustive for each category, but these two are enough. Providing a more comprehensive listing for each ranking could be viewed as something of a personality description using movies as words.

Taken is a 4-star film at minimum and I'll fight anyone who disagrees.

Though I do think it's an interesting example for the purposes of this thread. When it was released, it was a fairly brainless action movie which was remarkable because (and only because) it had Liam Neeson, respected multi-Golden-Globe-winning dramatic actor, in the lead role. As a result, it was reasonably well critically-received*, because his presence gave what is otherwise a fairly mediocre B-movie a weight that it wouldn't have had with a regular action star in the role. While I do think that the film could qualify as a guilty pleasure without Neeson, at least if you credit it with a degree of self-awareness (and in considering whether to do so it's worth noting that the writer, producer and director were all French), it's not something you would make a point of watching.

This was also in a period when it was rather rarer to see dramatic stars like Neeson appearing in action films of this type. While he himself had done a Star Wars movie and a Batman film, it was still jarring to see a "proper actor", at least one who was still a going concern, in a film like Taken, in 2008, in a way that it perhaps wouldn't be now.

But Taken was a sufficient success that Neeson took the opportunity to reinvent himself as an action star, and went on to make a bunch more action movies in a similar vein. And indeed (together with other things like the MCU) arguably contributed to a normalisation of seeing dramatic actors take on action roles in general. So now, 14 years on, Taken is no longer remarkable as anything other than the film which started Neeson's career reinvention: interesting only from an academic perspective, and no longer half so much fun.

Seeing it in 2008, and still with fond memories of it as it was when I watched it then, I would happily give it four stars**. Were I to have watched it for the first time in the last five years, I'd probably give it two.

So that's something else worth bearing in mind. Context matters when determining whether you think something is any good, and is easily forgotten.

*by the standards of its (sub)-genre
**subject to my reservations about star-rating systems in general.

[Ruck]

Do you find it to be effective art? Was it constructed with craft and skill?

That determines its quality. You don't need to have 'enjoyed' the work. Whether it's historically important is irrelevant.

Ultimately, you're trying to convey more information than a star rating system is capable of.

I don't think it's a question of "enjoyment," but perhaps, what do you do when "effective" and "craft and skill" diverge? When something is well-crafted but still feels empty or leaves you unmoved?

I hold the opposite opinion. If you make a piece of art with "craft and skill" but it's not enjoyable or engaging, too bad. You suck, try again next time.

Engaging is another good word for it that I think is more precise than "enjoyment."

[MCerberus]

Interesting example of this would be early 20th century serials that were published in magazines and periodicals that were later collected into novels. Think The Jungle, or pretty much all of early Sci-fi. I, as a modern reader, do not have the grounding of tropes and style expectations that a contemporary would. I then am incapable of truly consuming the media as was expected at the time.

You can see the merit and innovation but it simply does not work as a pure entertainment read.
A really great similar experience is seeing the trailer for Citizen Kane. For a modern audience it's really weird. Doesn't talk about the movie almost at all.
However, it was sold as and became a revolution in technical filmography.

So it becomes really wild trying to assign a number to it. Are you going to be the guy that gives Metropolis a 1?

[Caledonian]

I don't think it's a question of "enjoyment," but perhaps, what do you do when "effective" and "craft and skill" diverge? When something is well-crafted but still feels empty or leaves you unmoved?

I would argue that being "moved" is usually what works of art are attempting to do; whether you agree with the message or not is irrelevant to whether the message is well-conveyed.

We consider Angkor Wat to be of tremendous artistic significance, and an UNESCO World Heritage site, but we don't have to subscribe to the religious beliefs of the people who made it. I don't even know what they were in any detail.

I personally consider A Canticle for Leibowitz to be one of the great artistic achievements of science fiction, but I don't need to subscribe to any of the author's opinions to do so, any more than I need to be a believer in a church's doctrine to admire a masterfully-designed stained glass window. It's a great book, full stop.

[Aedilred]

So it becomes really wild trying to assign a number to it. Are you going to be the guy that gives Metropolis a 1?

With the rise of review aggregators, you do sometimes see "spoiler" critics (usually lower-tier ones) who will pan an otherwise universally loved film seemingly just for the publicity. The most obvious recent example that comes to mind is Paddington 2, which had a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes until late in the day some critic nobody had heard of until that moment published a review saying it was crap, thereby dropping the score to 99% and earning himself a bunch of headlines.

[Vahnavoi]

What if the item is mind affecting? what if it can make some small minority of the people who interact with it mentally unwell? That is the sort of thing that should be given zero stars however well or badly it is done.

All art is mind-affecting. You cannot consciously observe any object without it forming a causal relationship with your brain and mind.

As for making some minority of people mentally unwell? That's equivalent to food allergies. Would you give a food product a zero star rating just because someone, somewhere is allergic to it? Or would you agree with established practice that how bad a flaw containing allergens is, depends on all of commonality of said allergy, severity of symptoms, whether an end-user was forewarned and the benefits of containing said allergent to people who are not allergic to it?

[Kornaki]

What if similar products are by definition also unethical? People have canned excrement before now and sold it as art, would you want to compare cans between productions, or say any canned excrement is bad art?

A star rating is your personal input on what people should buy. If you think it's crap and people should buy something else, give it a zero.

Similar here means whatever the Internet chooses. If you're reviewing a copy of Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets, and someone is searching Amazon for gardening gloves, your rating is irrelevant. If they're searching Amazon for books for teenagers, your rating is more important.


There's no formal answer here. If you think chamber of secrets is the best book ever, give it 5 stars. If you think it's the best book ever but books are dumb and no one should ever buy a book, I don't know. Pick whatever star rating you think will help people. it's worth asking yourself why you are giving the best book a one star, instead of some random other book that is worse. If you're not going to give any other book a one star, nailing chamber of secrets with a one star probably isn't helping people make better purchasing decisions.

[halfeye]

All art is mind-affecting. You cannot consciously observe any object without it forming a causal relationship with your brain and mind.

Temporarily, sure. I was talking about longer lasting effects than that.

As for making some minority of people mentally unwell? That's equivalent to food allergies. Would you give a food product a zero star rating just because someone, somewhere is allergic to it? Or would you agree with established practice that how bad a flaw containing allergens is, depends on all of commonality of said allergy, severity of symptoms, whether an end-user was forewarned and the benefits of containing said allergent to people who are not allergic to it?

Allergies are usually a really small number of people. If it's like, say, Covid or Salmonella, do you see that that might be a different situation. Sort of like the old legal definition of "obscene" but without (probaby) the sex.

I am not suggesting that Harry Potter is anything like that bad.

[Vahnavoi]

Temporarily, sure. I was talking about longer lasting effects than that.

Even something like Harry Potter can demonstrably cause memories and behavioral changes capable of lasting years, even decades. Leaving a lasting impression isn't a particularly high bar for a work of art to pass. A sufficiently impressive work can keep indirectly influencing culture even after it has faded from mainstream - which is why we have this thread.

Allergies are usually a really small number of people. If it's like, say, Covid or Salmonella, do you see that that might be a different situation. Sort of like the old legal definition of "obscene" but without (probaby) the sex.

I am not suggesting that Harry Potter is anything like that bad.

Allergies threaten a fraction of people. The actual numbers get very big because there are a lot of people. For example, roughly half a percent of people in USA suffer from peanut allergy. USA has roughly 330 million people, so trace amounts of peanut are a concern for roughly 1.65 million people - enough to populate a small nation.

If 1.65 million people got on Twitter claiming they got nightmares from watching Dobby die, would that be enough of a reason to give a Harry Potter movie automatic zero rating?

[halfeye]

Leaving a lasting impression isn't a particularly high bar for a work of art to pass. A sufficiently impressive work can keep indirectly influencing culture even after it has faded from mainstream - which is why we have this thread.

I don't believe we are talking primarily about art.

Allergies threaten a fraction of people. The actual numbers get very big because there are a lot of people. For example, roughly half a percent of people in USA suffer from peanut allergy. USA has roughly 330 million people, so trace amounts of peanut are a concern for roughly 1.65 million people - enough to populate a small nation.

If 1.65 million people got on Twitter claiming they got nightmares from watching Dobby die, would that be enough of a reason to give a Harry Potter movie automatic zero rating?

What if they went out and started shooting up the place. That's the sort of problem I'm taking about.

[Rynjin]

What if they went out and started shooting up the place. That's the sort of problem I'm taking about.

No piece of art is responsible for someone deciding to become a mass murderer.

[Bohandas]

No piece of art is responsible for someone deciding to become a mass murderer.

I agree. I think Scream put it best. "Movies don't create psychos, movies just make psychos more creative"

[Satohika]

1, one, numero uno, etc.

This, right there.

[Anymage]

What if they went out and started shooting up the place. That's the sort of problem I'm taking about.

Finding reviews for a supernaturally mind affecting work of art on Amazon would be like finding reviews for heroin on Amazon in the real world. It would rightly be controlled and as such unavailable for general consumption, and thus there wouldn't be public listings to rate. People wanting to buy such a thing would almost certainly be going in knowing what they were looking for (again similar to psychoactive substances in our real world), and dark web site reviews would be written with that in mind. People rating heroin would be commenting on the quality of the heroin, not its overall effect on people's lives.

That's all hypothetical, of course, since supernaturally mind affecting works of art do not exist in our world.

Although the idea that people looking for any well known and significant work do so mindful of the cultural weight behind it is also relevant for the OP. For a significant example, the bible forms the foundation of staggering amounts of culture and history. I doubt most people rating bibles will do so either as a blind read of the material as stories in their own right, or try to have their rating reflect the bulk of religious history springing from it. Instead things like translation quality or even physical quality are going to be more germane to people looking to buy a bible. If it's a culturally significant work I'm going to assume that most people looking for it are going to be looking through that lens, and my rating criteria will be different than some newly published book that people are more likely to be interested/disinterested in on its own merits as a story.

[halfeye]

No piece of art is responsible for someone deciding to become a mass murderer.

Not all media is art.

Instructions for making bombs?

Extreme political or religious tracts?

I'm not saying banning the latter is good, but there's a case for banning the former, and there's no necessity to give the latter a high rating even if it is well produced.

[Vahnavoi]

I don't believe we are talking primarily about art.

Broaden the question to all types of media and the bar gets even lower.

What if they went out and started shooting up the place. That's the sort of problem I'm taking about.

And? That doesn't actually answer the question.

Again: for food allergens, actual physio-chemical substances that threaten life and health of some fraction of people, a rating would concern itself with commonality of symptoms, severity of symptoms, benefit to people who don't get any symptoms, and whether users were forewarned. The same principles can straightforwardly be applied to art, to propaganda, and to instruction manuals. Pyrotechnicians don't give automatic zero star ratings to bomb-building manuals just because someone somewhere might get a bad idea and blow themselves up. They give them ratings based on how well-made they are and how useful they would be to other pyrotechnicians.

[Caledonian]

We can exclude paranormally-mind-affecting pieces of art because they don't exist in the real world. The closest thing would be something like that episode of Pokemon where Porygon's rapid blue-and-red flash triggered seizures in vulnerable individuals.

If someone comes up with a work of art that acts like, for example, a Langford Basilisk, we can debate what star rating it should be given then. Until that point, it's moot.

[Rynjin]

Not all media is art.

Instructions for making bombs?

Extreme political or religious tracts?

I'm not saying banning the latter is good, but there's a case for banning the former, and there's no necessity to give the latter a high rating even if it is well produced.

Why are you writing reviews for bomb making instructions and Chick Tracts?

Don't try to change the subject, please.

[halfeye]

Why are you writing reviews for bomb making instructions and Chick Tracts?

Don't try to change the subject, please.

I strongly believe that this is actually the original subject as originally asked.

Note well that the examples could not be given due to the board rules.

[Kriegspiel]

Why are you writing reviews for bomb making instructions and Chick Tracts?

For the LOLs.

Yes, seriously.

[Ruck]

I would argue that being "moved" is usually what works of art are attempting to do; whether you agree with the message or not is irrelevant to whether the message is well-conveyed.

We consider Angkor Wat to be of tremendous artistic significance, and an UNESCO World Heritage site, but we don't have to subscribe to the religious beliefs of the people who made it. I don't even know what they were in any detail.

I personally consider A Canticle for Leibowitz to be one of the great artistic achievements of science fiction, but I don't need to subscribe to any of the author's opinions to do so, any more than I need to be a believer in a church's doctrine to admire a masterfully-designed stained glass window. It's a great book, full stop.

I would generally agree with being moved, similar to being engaged, as an important goal of art. But I never said anything about agreeing with its message, so I'm not sure why that's in there. Perhaps as part of the broader discussion?

The question, I think, is back at: How do you rate a piece of art that is technically well-crafted in many (or even all) aspects, but fails at that goal of moving you?

(My answer, at least, is pretty simple, based on experience: Not very well.)

The Chick tracts are an interesting item to bring up, since I suppose they technically are art, and while I don't think you have to agree with art to enjoy it, engage with it, or be moved by it, I do think those tracts serve as an illustrative example for the biggest reason I tend not to enjoy art I don't agree with-- it simply does not reflect my understanding of the reality of the human experience. (The Chick tracts are also poorly made on a number of other levels.) That's not strictly going to be the case with art I don't agree with*, but it's rarely as blatant as it is there.

(* - without getting too specific since I don't want to run afoul of any rules, I'll even say it's not strictly the case with religious art of a religion I don't practice. I can still understand, relate to, even experience concepts like faith, devotion, service, a belief in something greater. Chick tracts, on the other hand, seem to exist primarily to tell the kinds of people Jack Chick doesn't like that they're going to hell.)

With the rise of review aggregators, you do sometimes see "spoiler" critics (usually lower-tier ones) who will pan an otherwise universally loved film seemingly just for the publicity. The most obvious recent example that comes to mind is Paddington 2, which had a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes until late in the day some critic nobody had heard of until that moment published a review saying it was crap, thereby dropping the score to 99% and earning himself a bunch of headlines.

Heck, Armond White's made a career out of it.

[Caledonian]

The question, I think, is back at: How do you rate a piece of art that is technically well-crafted in many (or even all) aspects, but fails at that goal of moving you?

If it fails at moving you, then it's not well-crafted in all aspects. If a chair is uncomfortable to sit in because of the details of its design and fabrication, you can't say it's a well-made chair.

Arguably you can recognize that the chair was made with skill and knowledge, and would be satisfying to many people while not quite being right for you personally. But that's not the same thing as something making a chair, for you, and failing to get it quite right.

I am reminded of the story (supposedly true) of the Jewish man acting as a spy in Nazi Germany and having to attend one of Hitler's speeches: he hated and despised the man and everything he espoused, but he still found himself moved by the power of his oratory.

Even the Devil must be given his due, as the saying goes.

[Tyndmyr]

Why are you writing reviews for bomb making instructions and Chick Tracts?

Don't try to change the subject, please.

While the latter are short enough, and originals common enough that a review would probably be superflous outside of comedy value, reviews for the former strike me probably quite relevant indeed.

"Missing three fingers, so only four stars" is absolutely relevant to a prospective purchaser. Whenever one engages in any potentially dangerous hobby, making sure that the material you are working with is professional information is actually pretty important. Also, pretty sure not against the rules unless it's in the context of breaking laws or hurting someone.

For anything technical, I'd probably rate it primarily on how well it guides you through the task at hand, with other factors being a great deal less relevant. A witty personal story or the like might add to the experience, but if the info is bad, it's still going to get a poor rating.

[Keltest]

While the latter are short enough, and originals common enough that a review would probably be superflous outside of comedy value, reviews for the former strike me probably quite relevant indeed.

"Missing three fingers, so only four stars" is absolutely relevant to a prospective purchaser. Whenever one engages in any potentially dangerous hobby, making sure that the material you are working with is professional information is actually pretty important. Also, pretty sure not against the rules unless it's in the context of breaking laws or hurting someone.

For anything technical, I'd probably rate it primarily on how well it guides you through the task at hand, with other factors being a great deal less relevant. A witty personal story or the like might add to the experience, but if the info is bad, it's still going to get a poor rating.

I'm pretty sure the specific example used was not chosen because of its use as a technical manual. Certainly I can think of many better examples of a how-to guide without any other baggage attached if that was the intent.

[erikun]

Do you think that somebody should view it?

If yes, then give it the 10/10 but specify in the comments that it may not be enjoyable - or even agreeable - but that it is worth viewing. You'd probably want to specify why you found the work distasteful, but also clarify why it is important for somebody to sit down and read/view/engage with it anyway.

If no, then give it a 1/10. You can put in the comments about its historical significance, it's effect on the genre, or any other reasons why it is an important work. But you can also list your opinion that it isn't worth viewing, perhaps stating that only somebody invested in the history or completeness should bother with it.

Of course, I'm working with extremes here. It'd be perfectly fine to give it 7/10 or whatever else you'd consider fair for its importance, or just a 4/10 if you just found it only disappointing. But I would rate something that I think other people should view higher, even if some aspects are not pleasurable to watch. Especially in the case of online reviews, I think the review score to be a sort of recommendation to view score and so would score it highly if I felt that other people would benefit from viewing it as well.

[Scarlet Knight]

I believe there is a quote that goes something like: "A reviewer has to review the book the author intended to write, not the book the reviewer wished he had written."